4 Feb, 2023 15:13

Zelensky behind Macron's calls to Putin – Paris

Despite ruling out talks with Moscow, the Ukrainian leader reportedly uses his French counterpart as a go-between

French President Emmanuel Macron’s phone calls with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, mainly took place “at the request of President Zelensky” of Ukraine, a spokeswoman for the French Foreign Ministry stated on Saturday. Zelensky has publicly declared that he will never speak to Putin in person, and has made peace talks with the Russian leader illegal.

“Mr. Macron calls President Putin mainly at the request of President [Vladimir] Zelensky, and always in coordination with our allies to maintain a channel for dialogue,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Anne-Claire Legendre said during an interview with RTVI.

Kiev has never admitted that Zelensky presses his Western backers into speaking to Putin, and the Ukrainian leader himself signed a decree in October forbidding negotiations with Moscow unless “another president of Russia”replaces the current Kremlin occupant. With negotiations officially off the table, Zelensky has repeatedly vowed to use force to seize Russian territory that is claimed by Ukraine, including Crimea.

Among Western leaders, Macron is one of a small minority who maintain contact with Putin. Both he and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have held regular phone calls with the Russian leader since Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine began almost a year ago.

Legendre said that at some point “Ukrainians will decide that the time has come for negotiations. That is why we consider it useful to maintain this channel of dialogue.”

Macron and Scholz have been condemned by their Eastern European allies for holding discussions with Putin. “Why talk to him? He’s a war criminal,” Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas declared last summer. “I feel that if everybody is constantly calling him, he doesn’t get the message that he’s isolated.”

Although Macron has defended his conversations with Putin, and has spoken publicly of the need to reach a ceasefire deal that doesn’t “humiliate Russia,” he has still supplied Kiev’s military with progressively heavier weapons. France announced last month that it would send infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine, and Macron last week refused to rule out the eventual transfer of fighter jets.

Western nations that supply weapons to Ukraine have made themselves de facto participants in the conflict, Moscow has repeatedly stated.

https://www.rt.com/news/570961-macron-calls-putin-zelensky/

4 Feb, 2023 12:44

Uproar after sinking of warship in Atlantic

The act by the Brazilian Navy has prompted an outcry from environmentalists

Environmental groups have responded with anger after the Brazilian Navy sank its former flagship aircraft carrier in the Atlantic. The decommissioned ship was initially slated to be dismantled for scrap metal in Türkiye, but was refused entry.

The “planned and controlled sinking” of the 32,800-ton ‘Sao Paulo’ took place late in the afternoon on Friday, some 350km (217 miles) off the Brazilian coast at a depth of about 5,000 meters, according to a statement from the navy. The final resting place was selected with regard to the navigational, environmental, and economic aspects of such a move, it added.

The decision to scuttle the ship came after Turkish company Sok Denizcilik was authorized last year to scrap the vessel for metal, in what the Brazilian Defense Ministry called “an unprecedented attempt” to recycle it in a “safe and environmentally sound” manner.

However, after the start of the vessel’s transit, Türkiye blocked the procedure due to concerns from its environmental authorities. Brazil was forced to bring the carrier home, but did not allow it to enter port over the “high risk”to the environment.

With the ‘Sao Paulo’ facing the danger of spontaneously submerging due to buoyancy issues, the Defense Ministry said there wasno other option than “jettisoning the hull, through the planned and controlled sinking.”

While Brazil sank the ship in a specially selected zone, the move drew the ire of environmental activists. In a statement on Saturday, NGO Basel Action Network said that the vessel contained some 760 tons of hazardous asbestos, and hundreds of tons of other toxic substances, including heavy metal-laden paint.

The organization asserted that the sinking “will no doubt contaminate the marine ecosystem in the dumpsite area for years to come.”

The ‘Sao Paulo’ was a Clemenceau-class aircraft carrier which was originally commissioned by the French Navy under name ‘Foch’ in 1963. The vessel, which could carry about 40 aircraft, was handed over to Brazil in 2000, becoming its new flagship. After being plagued by maintenance issues, the ‘Sao Paulo’ was decommissioned in 2017.

https://www.rt.com/news/570955-brazil-sinks-aircraft-carrier/

4 Feb, 2023 13:12

Donetsk apartment block hit by Ukrainian artillery – mayor

The city was bombarded by NATO-caliber rounds, Aleksey Kulemzin said

An apartment block in the Donbass city of Donetsk was shelled with NATO-caliber munitions by Ukrainian forces on Saturday, Mayor Aleksey Kulemzin said.

Kulemzin posted photos of a four-story building, which he said had sustained a direct hit. The official said one person believed to have been in the location at the time of the strike was unaccounted for. Regional emergency officials, meanwhile, said two people may still be trapped under the rubble.

According to the mayor, 155mm-caliber rounds were fired at the city. Kulemzin said projectiles landed on several streets, damaging at least one other residential building. He later added that a 30-year-old woman had been wounded.

Russian officials have repeatedly accused Ukraine of using Western-supplied weapons to indiscriminately fire on cities in Donbass. Late last month, the Russian Defense Ministry said Ukraine had destroyed a hospital in the city of Novoaydar in the Lugansk People’s Republic with a US-made HIMARS multiple rocket launcher. According to officials, 14 people were killed and 24 wounded in an attack on the facility, which had been treating both military personnel and civilians.

Kiev has also accused Russian troops of targeting civilians. On Wednesday night, three people were killed and 20 injured after a missile hit a house in the Ukrainian-held Donbass city of Kramatorsk, according to Kiev-appointed regional official, Pavel Kirilenko. Moscow, meanwhile, has maintained that its forces only strike military targets and sites that are being used for military purposes.

Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine nearly a year ago, citing the need to protect the people of Donbass and Kiev’s failure to implement the 2014-15 Minsk peace accords. Ukraine has said the attack was entirely unprovoked.

https://www.rt.com/russia/570957-donetsk-shelling-nato-caliber/

4 Feb, 2023 13:13

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The logic behind the terror: Why does Ukraine keep attacking civilian areas in Donetsk?

Rockets have hit peaceful neighborhoods once again. Why does Kiev continue its policy, if not purely out of hate?

At least ten rocketshit central areas of Donetsk on Saturday morning, damaging three residential buildings, a local Russian official has reported in his Telegram channel.

One of the projectiles fired by Ukrainian forces hit an apartment building in the Kievsky district. While rescuers continue to search for survivors under the rubble, preliminary information suggests that there were three people in one of the apartments.

There was no information on casualties at the time of writing, but the absence of victims would be unusual; indeed, Ukrainian shelling of the capital of the Donetsk People's Republic intensified weeks before the Russian attack in February 2022, and has taken a heavy toll ever since.

The suffering of Donbass residents

According to the human rights commissioner of the DPR, Daria Morozova, at least 1,091 civilians were killed and another 3,533 were recorded as injured last year as a result of combat operations. The figures do not include places such as Mariupol, where the full scale of the tragedy has yet to be assessed.

The 4,624 people mentioned above were victims of regular artillery strikes on urban areas of Donetsk and Gorlovka.

When Donetsk residents are asked why the Ukrainian Armed Forces continue to attack civilians, people usually have no explanation other than the desire of the Ukrainian government and military to destroy Donbass and its people. This is supported by a massive campaign to dehumanize local residents and a number of hateful statements by Ukrainian politicians. “We will kill them with nuclear weapons,” warned former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, while ex-president Pyotr Poroshenko has vowed: “Our children will go to school, while their children will go sit in basements. That’s how we will win this war.”

Ukrainian forces continue to bomb Donbass despite the shortage of shells experienced by both sides of the conflict. However, while Russia can solve this issue by activating its military-industrial complex, Ukraine is entirely dependent on foreign supplies.

It should make a lot more sense for Ukraine to use scarce ammunition on military targets rather than on peaceful residential areas. Even if a lot of the time, Kiev's forces misfire. A typical example is a Ukrainian shell landing in the frozen Kalmius River that divides Donetsk.

How Ukraine explains the attacks

Whenever Ukrainian artillery hits a civilian object – for example, a flower market – or kills civilians, officials in Kiev deny it. Unofficial voices resort to false claims that no such thing ever happened. Over the past eight years, the latter have come up with several memes allegedly proving that the Ukrainian Army wasn’t involved – with explanations such as “the air conditioner exploded.” Even if Ukrainian forces manage to hit a military facility, such as a warehouse, they usually deny involvement, claiming that “someone smoked in the wrong place” and that the explosion wasn’t related to the conflict. Thus, an information environment is created that denies the fact that Kiev attacks cities….

https://www.rt.com/russia/570954-logic-behind-ukrainian-terrorism/

>>18284010

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The Ukrainian side claims the attacks on civilians are “self-inflicted” – implying that the Russian Army attacks cities under its control, supposedly to blame Ukrainian forces and demonize them in the eyes of the population, as well as for propaganda purposes.This kind of post-truthhas given rise to a whole area of fact-checking, where journalists collaborate with open-source intelligence to calculate the trajectory of the strikes.

For Donbass residents, all this is extremely painful. Discussions of terrorist attacks on civilian infrastructure often end in profanities. According to Donbass locals, Ukrainians keep on attacking Donetsk simply because they can. Meanwhile, people are just trying to survive and are waiting for the front to move away from the area. Other details don’t concern them.

However, this is a distorted view of the situation; there is every reason to believe that the regular shelling of cities in Donbass is part of Ukrainian strategy and follows military logic. PerhapsKiev’s “hybrid war” era military doctrinehas adopted terrorist methods. So, how do these attacks on the civilian population help Ukraine?

Psychological pressure

Let’s take a clear example. In June 2022, the units of the first corps of the People’s Militia of the DPR were dislodged from their permanent locations because of the battle for Lisichansk – they had to storm a huge section of the front from Popasnaya to Verkhnekamenka, moving from south to north. The Russian Armed Forces then lacked personnel and had to use troops from Donetsk. Ukraine intensified strikes on the city to force the leadership to return the units back to their locations.

A similar thing is happening now. Some areas are under pressure – in particular, the fighters of the Wagner Group are pressing in Soledar and Artyomovsk (known in Ukraine as Bakhmut). They are advancing backed by the artillery of the Russian Armed Forces. Ukrainians use civilian strikes to provoke politicians, hoping that they will influence the military and interfere with the army’s plans. In June, this plan failed and the Ukrainians, taking advantage of the lack of counter-battery fire in the Donetsk region, committed a number of atrocities.

Commenting on the situation in a private conversation, one fighter explained why the army didn't take the bait: “Normally, no military man – from simple soldier to general – suffers if the enemy attacks the city. This sounds harsh, but it’s better for the enemy to attack the city than the army’s manpower. This would be the usual military logic, but there is one key detail:95% of our corps are made up of local residentswho are worried about their cities. So, after completing the mission in Lisichansk, our soldiers were very angry when they got back to Donetsk.”

This is all very close to home for fighters from Donbass. In the case of a fast-paced conflict without a stable front line, such attacks would have motivated the soldiers, by enraging them. Perhaps this explains the near-complete silence of the Ukrainian artillery in the first month of the Russian military campaign. In those days, when the front line was mobile, it was better not to further motivate the enemy.

>>18284020

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However, in positional warfare,fighters are conscious of a permanent threatto their relatives and other civilians in their hometowns. Motivated warriors who identify themselves as “defenders” feel as if they don’t have enough strength to break through. This acts to discourage. Concern for those who are not on the front line returns the soldier to his other life, behind the front lines, and distracts him from battle.

By itself, this does not break morale, but soldiers are alsoaffected by constant adrenaline swings, a risk of death or injury to themselves or their brothers in arms, the cold and damp conditions, the monotony of their work (for example, a good soldier digs more often than shoots), and numerous other factors.

Russia doesn’t have a strong memory of World War I – it has been replaced by that of World War II. However, the current fighting resembles the trench warfare of the early 20th century. With the possibility to adjust and fine-tune firing using Chinese drones and the chance to search the internet for how to repair military equipment. The rest of it – mud, trenches, the frozen front line – is like World War I, including politicians demanding a large-scale and ambitious offensive.

Why can’t the strikes be stopped?

At the end of July 2022, such an event began in the Donetsk region. Its main goal was to free the city from artillery strikes. The Donetsk corps were successful for several days, but then became stuck in positional battles. By the end of January, six months into the operation, the army had barely advanced 10km (6 miles).

The fighters were unable to break through the pre-established line of defense, and the forces only managed to wedge and slowly push through the three lines of fortifications near the villages of Vodianoye and Opitnoe, north of Donetsk airport. However, the fighters cannot give up on storming these fortifications – the strikes on Donetsk and Makeyevka must end for good.

As a result, there have been signs of an emerging contradiction. On the one hand, military leaders who are interested in achieving military goals and saving manpower, and on the other, politicians who express the interests of the civilian population and want to put a swift end to the artillery terror. Politicians want the public to like them. They don’t want to deal with the consequences of hostilities, hoping for things to return to normal so they can receive funding to restore the affected regions. As a result, they view the situation quite differently from the military.

Through manipulation, propaganda and informational and psychological influence, Ukrainians have made cunning use of the differences between civilian and military interests. This comes down to a grotesque choice between “killing the army in Avdeevka” and “allowing the Ukrainian Armed Forces to wipe Donetsk off the face of the Earth.” If politicians push the army to force the assault, the latter will make more mistakes, which will reduce their power. This, in turn, favors Kiev.

Perhaps seeking rational reasons behind the artillery strikes in Donbass is pointless – maybe it’s just the manifestation of rage on behalf of Ukrainian nationalists. However, if we ask ourselves “who benefits from this,” there is a creeping suspicionthat terrorizing the populationwith NATO ammunition is a strategy initiated by Ukraine’s top military leadership. Firstly, these attacks tie up the forces of the Russian Army and distract it from concentrating on other areas. Secondly, they negatively affect the combat spirit of the fighters from Donbass. And finally, they allow political factors to intervene in military strategy, dealing a serious blow to its quality.

By Vladislav Ugolny, a Russian journalist based in Donetsk

With Ukraine “=We Are In The Dark Valley Of The 1930s==” Steve Bannon’s Warning To America

https://rumble.com/embed/v25nnj8/?pub=4

777 HERCULES 777

@77HERCULES77

Boom!💥💥💥💥💥 Nothing to See Here!

2:49 AM · Feb 4, 2023

Whoa Anons, Comer with proof

https://twitter.com/77HERCULES77/status/1621777838528503808

>>18284123

Part 2 Comer with proof

777 HERCULES 777@77HERCULES77

Part 2

Numerous Whistleblowers came forth

2:52 AM · Feb 4, 2023

https://twitter.com/77HERCULES77/status/1621778623010144258

>>18284185

3rd Comer video

777 HERCULES 777@77HERCULES77

Part 3

2:58 AM · Feb 4, 2023

https://twitter.com/77HERCULES77/status/1621780260436975619

https://twitter.com/45LVNancy/status/1621892913524539392?s=20&t=y0nY7lf-U8vzz8Huvm8mug

il Donaldo Trumpo@PapiTrumpo

LET'S GO!!!🇺🇸

Guitar solo Star Spangled Banner

Embedded video

1:52

46K views

4:33 PM · Feb 2, 2023

https://twitter.com/PapiTrumpo/status/1621260505141710852

So many balloon memes

https://twitter.com/PapiTrumpo/status/1621637739681648643?s=20&t=8slWyg4cGWCHlFaBzzU6JA

>>18284324

>>18284047

Whores on the world stage

>>18284313

Yw, I’m saving for days I need a pick me up

>>18284123

If no federal agency is gonna arrest the Bidans, isn’t it time for the military to remove the Manchurian Candidate?There is now proof that they committed treason for many years, and are still committing treason today. When does anyone stop the destruction of America?

>>18284368

Whoa, thats a lot of planes. Derek Johnson said since Jan. 20, 2021 no less than 300 military planes are over the US daily.

I can confirm in my Area in Georgia, I see or hear up to 6-9 military aircraft daily now.

Before Jan 20, it was extremely rare to see planes, maybe 1 of week.

This is gonna sound strange, but I hear a lot of planes but cannot visually spot them, and it happens frequently. Its weird! They seem to be coming from Dobbins Air Force Base and Alabama